Articles by Chris Macrae

Choosing the right tools to build a website isn’t easy these days. There’s just too many options! Building a static site is one of these options, which comes with many advantages like top-notch security, blazingly-fast performance, and reduced costs.
When it comes to building static sites, the two leading solutions right now are Hugo and Jekyll. So the question is, which is right for you?
To answer that question, we’ll take a look at the features, speed, and extensibility of each, looking for the pros and the cons of both generators.

This guide was most recently updated on March 16, 2018.
— – For this week on Frontend Friday, we have a follow up to Up & Running With Hugo, Part 1: Building Your First Site. This week, we cover integrating your repository with GitHub, and setting up continuous integration and continuous deployment with Forestry.io and some other handy tools.
Table of Contents Introduction Setting up Git Setting up Continuous Integration Setting up Continuous Deployment with Forestry Next Steps 1) Introduction Before we continue, you might be asking What is CI & CD.

This guide was most recently updated on March 9, 2018.
— – The popular static site generator written in GoLang - Hugo - has taken the community by storm. It brings all the benefits of a static site generator - 100% Flexibility, Security, Speed - but also steals the show otherwise 👉 Hugo + Jekyll Benchmarked. In fact, the Forestry.io website is built with Hugo.
For this week on Frontend Friday, we’ll be covering how to get set up with Hugo on your local machine, including setting up a theme and customizing it, as well as writing your own CSS & JS.

For this week on Frontend Friday, we’ll be covering how to set up lightning ⚡️ fast search for your Hugo site using Algolia, the SaaS (Search as a Service 😉 ) provider. We published a Jekyll-focused version of this guide last week.
Algolia’s self-proclaimed claim-to-fame is that they are“the most reliable platform for building search into your business,” and honestly, it’s hard to disagree. Forestry’s search is powered by Algolia (just try searching for Algolia in the search above!

For this week on Frontend Friday, we’ll be covering how to set up lightning ⚡️ fast search for your Jekyll site using Algolia, the SaaS (Search as a Service 😉 ) provider.
Algolia’s self-proclaimed claim-to-fame is that they are “the most reliable platform for building search into your business,” and honestly, it’s hard to disagree. Forestry’s search is powered by Algolia (just try searching for Algolia in the search above!

We’ve also compared Jekyll & Hugo features across 6 dimensions. Learn More
Hugo and Jekyll are the leading static site generators according to StaticGen.com, and both supported by our CMS. We’re often asked which tool performs better so we decided to do an analysis.
TL;DR We ran two tests to measure build times with Hugo and Jekyll. The basic test used the default installation of Jekyll and Hugo to build sites with 10 posts,100 posts, 1,000 posts and 10,000 posts.

We’ve got great improvements to share with you from Forestry.io, involving Forestry’s Media Library.
The Media Library allows content editors to easily upload images, videos, and much more without needing to understand Git.
Single Upload Directory We’ve received a lot of feedback from the community about which media should be displayed in the media library.
Forestry used to display media from all folders throughout the project. Not all of these folders are useful for your editors, and resulted in theme assets, favicons, and other media being displayed.

Want to chat with the Forestry.io community about static sites, best-practices, features, and more? Join the slack community here (we’ll get back to you ASAP).
Sign up here: Forestry.io Community Email –

Introducing Forestry Config Files Last month we released a big update to Front Matter Templates, which provided an unprecedented level of control over the user interface content editors use to edit their Hugo and Jekyll sites with.
Today we’re introducing a new feature to equally empower developers: Forestry Config Files.
Config files allow developers to create and manage the settings and Front Matter Templates of a site directly in the Git Repo.

This week we’ve got a small, but very useful update we’re excited to share with you.
WYSIWYG Formatting in Textareas Our textarea Front Matter field has been upgraded to allow for WYSIWYG input. Enjoy being able to add bold, italic, underline, and code formatting.
Enable WYSIWYG for Textareas You can enable the WYSIWYG features by enabling the “WYSIWYG” toggle on any textarea Front Matter field.
Give Us Feedback While the WYSIWYG features are inline only right now, we’re looking to develop this field into a truly powerful tool.